For­mer Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has ac­cused Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of once again spread­ing “lies” in an at­tempt to rewrite the events sur­round­ing the 2021 Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (PolSC) mer­it list de­ba­cle.

In a sharply word­ed Face­book post on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Row­ley re­spond­ed to Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s com­ments dur­ing Fri­day’s de­bate on the ap­point­ment of a Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er. She claimed, “The (then) prime min­is­ter ran to Pres­i­dent’s House, grabbed the mer­it list, so pub­lic con­fi­dence re­al­ly has fall­en to an all-time low in the TTPS.”

“That is a lie!” Row­ley de­clared. “I as that for­mer Prime Min­is­ter have nev­er seen a mer­it list and nev­er dis­cussed a mer­it list with any­one.”

He said what he did do was de­liv­er a re­port to the PolSC chair­man that stemmed from an in­ves­ti­ga­tion he ini­ti­at­ed in his ca­pac­i­ty as chair­man of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

“The trans­fer of this doc­u­ment had ab­solute­ly noth­ing to do with the Pres­i­dent,” Row­ley wrote. “It was done by me in keep­ing with my du­ty as con­firmed by the High Court. To do oth­er­wise would have been ‘a dere­lic­tion of du­ty’ as stat­ed by the High Court.”

He added that what the Com­mis­sion chose to do with the re­port, once it re­ceived it, was en­tire­ly a mat­ter for the Com­mis­sion in its in­de­pen­dent au­thor­i­ty.

Row­ley ac­cused Per­sad-Bisses­sar of de­lib­er­ate­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ing his ac­tions and those of the for­mer Pres­i­dent, whom she pre­vi­ous­ly sought to im­peach over the same mat­ter.

“She con­tin­ues to slan­der, dis­tort and lie—this time plac­ing her lies in the Hansard as part of a des­per­ate at­tempt to ma­nip­u­late the pub­lic record,” he said. “But no mat­ter how many times she re­peats these false­hoods, she is not en­ti­tled to her own ‘facts’.”

Dur­ing Fri­day’s de­bate, Per­sad-Bisses­sar ac­cused the for­mer gov­ern­ment of in­ter­fer­ence in the process to ap­point a po­lice com­mis­sion­er.

“Every time a no­ti­fi­ca­tion came here, they took the top of the list and put it on the bot­tom,” she said.

But Row­ley main­tained that once the PolSC re­ceived the re­port from him, the body act­ed in­de­pen­dent­ly and law­ful­ly.

“This is not the first time she has tried to drag the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter and the Of­fice of the Pres­i­dent in­to a scan­dal of her own in­ven­tion,” he said. “What she is do­ing now is dan­ger­ous—and dis­hon­est.”